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1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right In Finland
An anonymous reader writes "Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The Finnish people are also legally guaranteed a 100Mb broadband connection by the end of 2015."
"Reasonable speed access to free porn" has now become a basic human right?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There are many legal rights that you don't need to survive. One of them (in most western countries) is the right to vote. It is a legal right as soon as someone makes a law stating that it is. Simple as that.
I'll wait to move there until they establish the right to winters that don't drop below zero.
Trust me, they never have fewer than zero winters per year.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Rights are always an imposition on someone else. The right to free speech obliges others to tolerate offensive speech. The right to a fair trial obliges others to provide you with one. The right to bear arms (a popular one with people who advocate arguments such as yours) increases the risks of death from gunshot wounds for other people. The right to own property denies others the use of that property.
The question is whether the rights are worth the imposition.
This news has been written quite loosely around the news sites - original article (in finnish) states that ISP's must be capable of offering reasonably priced, atleast 1Mb broadband to every house. During this year Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority will state who those ISP's are that must be able to provide the services (probably the largest ones). So it's not free, like many seem to think - just reasonably priced (probably around 20-50e/month)
This part yet is not really that interesting since it's already pretty much common place.
However the law also states that the speed of the line must be atleast 75% of the said one during 24 hour measurement period. And what's more interesting is that by 2015 it will be 100mbit. Even though this is already available in the largest cities, it will mean major infrastructure development from the ISP's in other areas.
Oh and btw, no ISP in Finland has transfer limits or such crap. Not even mobile operators, who offer unlimited 5Mbit 3G for something like 30e/month.
Hopefully this also means that those three-strike laws wont be possible, since getting broadband access should be a legal right.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Hey-NY-Times-Broadband-Coverage-Gaps-Are-Not-Hooey-100382
Unless you talking about expensive satellite.
Yes, the population in America is generally pretty dense, so we tend to lag behind the rest of the world.
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens.
Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Those backward Finns. They don't realize that this makes them less free. I suppose they have health care for everyone over there and think it's a good thing. I bet people get free education through college in Finland, too. What a shame.
Thank god I live in a country where I'm free to lose my home if my wife or kid gets sick, just as our Founding Fathers intended. Now that's liberty. At least until that horrible President Hussein Osama forces us to have health insurance and we become a pitiful third-world country like Finland.
You can have my overpriced, traffic-shaped, capped DSL when you wrest it from my cold, dead hands.
Oh, and God Bless America.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As an American living in one of the oft talked about rural areas of America with access to only dial up (which gives me a whopping 28.8k connection due to signal quality), or over priced satellite, I am more than ready for something along this line to be adopted here. At a time when more and more information and services are being distributed over the Internet, it gives us rural people a big disadvantage. For example, I work rotating shifts in a factory and would like to go to college to get a degree eventually. Due to my shift work, a physical classroom is out of the question, admissions would laugh me right out if the campus, but an online program through a local and respected school could help me to get to that goal. An online college course is not an option when it takes >30 minutes to load a 10 second video or when you have to split a 50 mb download over 5 nights to get the data. I promise, if the shoe were on the other foot you'd understand where I'm coming from.
How about IDN URLs? Example: http://anmälan.museum/
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't.
Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
That's because you put an HTML entity in there instead of the real character. The real bug is that Slashcode can't handle true Unicode, which is pathetic. Proof: when I use the fake compose key on my keyboard, I get ä, which is valid unicode but garbage whatever-the-fuck-slashcode-uses.
Scratch that, it's not garbage in this particular incident. So your URL is http://anmälan.museum/
WTF Slashcode?! I didn't &-encode that! You are broken!
But this doesn't work: ¥øü å ဠæØñ üß. It's supposed to say, in very weird lettering, "All your charmap are belong to us". AFAICT it is valid unicode, although I'm too stupid to find the yen sign in charmap (it's not under currency symbols, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere). So apparently SOMEONE partially fixed UTF-8 support behind my back *looks around suspiciously* and then that SOMEONE failed to completely fix it.
I wonder if anyone will wonder how this post is relevant after reading it (oh god^H^H^H FSM, recursion).
$ make available
Right, just like that self-employed guy who can't afford $2200 a month for $5000 deductible health insurance for his family and his wife gets cancer and loses his home. He's not stuck. He could always rob a liquor store or sell one of his kids.
But he does have options ("sniff").
You are welcome on my lawn.
In my view, Internet access is more important and powerful than the postal and library services combined. Surely if the government provides those basic services through taxation, a basic Internet communications infrastructure should also.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
It's been pretty amazing over the last few months watching Americans demand that the government NOT guarantee them affordable health care.
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens. Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
or you could say, government allows all citizens to provide for each other in an efficient and cost effective manner.
What good is the right to a broadband connection if they don't have the right to an unfiltered connection? In case you didn't know, a filter maintained by Finnish police that's supposed to block child pornography also blocks other content, including a website critical of Finland's internet filter:
http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2008-02-18.html
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Or, you can turn your life over to a government with the promises of all your needs being taken care of from cradle to grave. All you have to give them is... everything.
"Everything"? I live in Finland, were we are apparently taken care of by the state from cradle to grave. Have we given "everything" to the state? No. Sure, we pay taxes (last time I checked, USA has taxes as well). But I own my home, my car, I'm free to marry whoever I want... How exactly have I given "everything" to the state?
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures.
It's fashionable to bash the healthcare-system. But if I feel that the public health-care does not fit my needs, I'm free to use private services.
They're starting to wonder just why it's necessary to be paying so much in taxes.
We are? In fact, several polls in Finland say that people would be willing to pay more taxes for improved public services.
They're starting to wonder why starting a business has to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
It is? There's plenty of entrepreneurs over here. My mother was one. It does't seem that starting a business is a "bureaucratic nightmare". Anyone who wants to start a business can do so.
And they're starting to vote appropriately
The right-wing parties they are voting at the moment are more or less equivalent to Democrats in USA. Some of them would be left from Democrats.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Facts please!
Urbanization:
US 82%
Finland 63%
So we're more concentrated in cities.
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People density per million square KMs
US 31 million per million square kms.
Finland 15 million per million square kms.
So there are less of them per square km!
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So there goes "We all live in the countryside" and "We're more spread out." Per person it's much easier to wire an American than a Fin.
I'll save the cost argument for someone else but 10x seems unlikely and the facts that were easy to check were exactly the opposite of what you claimed, so I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reliability of any claim you make.
Dear Citizen,
People feeding you are living in the middle of nowhere.
Just starves retards.
Best regards,
The comity of people living in the middle of nowhere.
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights"...
No, I'm not the least bit confused. If anything it is you who are confused, or worse... you are deliberately presenting a false argument.
This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
The moment you break out the term "slave" you lose ALL credibility whatsoever. The doctor is not his slave in any rational sense.
The doctor doesn't have to show up for work. The doctor doesn't even have to be a doctor. The doctor is not a slave. If he doesn't feel like caring for patients he can quit any time he likes.
The ONLY actual forced imposition on anyone is the taxation used to fund these programs. And sure, you can wave your arms all you like about how your a "slave" in your own country because they make you participate in funding the maintenance of the military too, and the police, and the fire department, and water/sewage, and public schools, and highways, and so on... but I'm not having any of it.
I refuse to be drawn into a debate with any idiot who thinks even the basic trappings of society amount to slavery.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery. The fact that he now has an obligation to you doesn't make him a slave. Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society. That's not slavery.
Its a hyperbolic misapplication of the word to the point of absurdity.